Today the typical end-user generates a large number of data as the by product of living in the digital space. These multiple data-repositories represent valuable data-sets capturing an individual's life.

OpenPDS provides a platform for individuals and organizations to manage these disparate repositories by providing a uniform user interface.

More importantly, for queriers seeking to access data within an repository OpenPDS filters response through a Safe Answers engine, and provides the data-owner a tunable degree of privacy-preservation.

With the rise of smartphones and their built-in sensors as well as web-apps, an increasing amount of Personal data is being silently collected. Personal data–digital information about users’ location, calls, web-searches, and preferences–is undoubtedly the oil of the new economy. However, the lack of access to the data makes it very hard if not impossible for an individual to understand and manage the risks associated with the collected data. Therefore, advancements in using and mining this data have to evolve in parallel with considerations about Data Ownership and privacy.

Many of the initial and critical steps towards individuals Data Ownership are technological. Given the huge number of data sources that a user interacts with on a daily basis, interoperability is not enough. Rather, the user needs to actually own a secured space, a Personal Data Store (PDS) acting as a centralized location where his data live. Owning a PDS would allow the user to view and reason about the data collected. The user can then truly control the flow of data and manage fine-grained authorizations for accessing his data. [2]